ABC-CLIO eBooks

Anthropology of Sleep Carol M. Worthman Anthropology aims to document and understand the full sweep of human diversity. As such, an anthropological account of sleep should include evolutionary, comparative, and descriptive cultural and biobehavioral evidence about the what, why, and so what of this most common of behaviors. Yet the account is incomplete because anthropology, so concerned with people’s waking lives, has scanted sleep but now is waking up to its importance. Sleep is a product of biology and culture: emerging material on the diversity of human sleep practices questions some assumptions of sleep science and contrasts with Western sleep cultures even as it confirms others. Along with evolutionary analysis, this material provides new ideas about old problems concerning why we sleep, how it works, what it does, what affects it, and what can go wrong. Evolutionary Considerations A comprehensive anthropology of human sleep begins by looking at its place in the species’ adaptive complex. Humans flourish under widely differing conditions in an enormous range of environments, by relying on a suite of cultural and biological adaptations. Culture and social life are indispensable for human survival and integral to development and function. Consequently, culture shapes the worlds that humans inhabit. Children grow up and adults survive by living in social groups structured and operating through culture, composed of shared modes of thought, perception, and behavior, including beliefs, values, and practices. The dependence on culture is built in to organic design, as exemplified by the ability to acquire language. Thus, culture gets under the skin. Sleep is no exception, and a survey of key human features suggests how. First, intense sociality mandates that sleep is social, designed to accommodate and likely to rely on the presence of others for physical, social, and emotional security. Infants depend completely on adult care, for example, and the historic ethnographic record documents that cultures consistently placed babies in the bed or room with caregivers, in contrast to societies today that place infants in